brushes.paints.stencils.

Robert Rauschenberg past away last night at his home after he was recently treated for pneumonia…

Years ago, I remember looking at the clock as I printed out thumbnail size images of Robert’s paintings, and laughing at myself because it was past 3 am. I was inspired and beyond exhaustion, as I cut out the images of Rauschenberg’s beautiful paintings and collages. On my office wall – before it was covered with hundreds of copies of a portrait Picasso on the left and the other half covered with a portrait of Einstein – I had created a large matrix made out of thread and thumb tacks. Based on the results of two algorithms – one that defined the most import color of the image, the other that defined its location in a 2d color space – I manually placed hundreds of images in the matrix, on my wall. This allowed me to visually ‘walk-thru’ the code in order to see any anomalies that might need adjustment. This color visualization would later define the rules of how the colors are plotted on my site, In The Mod. To this day, those images are still up on my wall, inspiring me over and over.

Artist, philanthropist Robert Rauschenberg dead at 82, NBC2 News Online

Robert Rauschenberg, NYT article

Rauschenberg: Art and Photos

A conversation with artist Robert Rauschenberg - Charlie Rose

In The Mod: Rauschenberg’s Yoicks

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Captivating!

Blu from blu

Toca Me

folly’s latest ArtCast series enters its second week tomorrow, with the release of a new set of podcastable artworks, this time exploring the tensions between sound and movement.

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Week 1, released 10th April 2008
This is the first of four weekly podcasts in association with moves08, in which audio and video art exploring the theme of this year’s moves festival, the interaction of movement and sound, has been selected from an international open call. For the first week two audio and three video pieces have been brought together, all of which have a shared wit and communicative sensibility.

Week 2, released 17th April 2008
This week’s selection explores and makes manifest tensions which arise in the relation of audio to visual, sound to movement, and vice versa. One audio and two video pieces communicate the intensity inherent in such relationships.

Week 3, released 24th April 2008
For the third week of podcasts exploring the move08 festival theme of the interaction between movement and sound, three videos and one audio piece have been selected. There is a subtlety in the execution of these pieces which crosses the line between calming or contemplative and something more unnerving and sinister. [One of the pieces I worked on with Squeak E Clean will be included in this podcast. - Woohoo!]

Week 4, released 1st May 2008
The final podcast in this series, released to coincide with moves08, takes a more descriptive or observational approach to the theme, addressing both verbal and visual approaches to commentary and the act of description, in one audio and two contrasting video pieces.

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If you missed Week One last week, you can subscribe now - for free - to hear and see them in a variety of formats (no iPod required).

folly’s ArtCast is an ongoing series of podcasting programmes - a platform for public access to new, innovative sound & video art. Find out about the ways you can access ArtCast right now by visiting www.folly.co.uk/ArtCast.

For the Spring 2008 programme folly has worked with moves - www.movementonscreen.org.uk - to select sound and video art relating to the moves08 festival theme of ?the interaction of choreographed movement and sound?.

Selected from an international open call for submissions, ArtCast Spring 2008 includes four audio and four video podcasts, released weekly throughout April.

Experience ArtCast now at www.folly.co.uk/ArtCast.

On April 19th at FITC: Toronto, I’ll be teaching a workshop on developing swf palettes/panels and AIR apps that drive Adobe CS3 applications, while using workflows that should transition smoothly into developing for CS4 apps.

The workshop will include an overview of the framework, methods and different tools of driving Adobe CS3 apps via code including: differences between palettes & panels and what types there are; what applications support which palettes/panels and what types are supported; intro to scripting via ExtendScript Toolkit; intro to creating swf palettes/panels; intro to creating AIR apps to drive Adobe apps; Purchasing/Distribution; Installation & Streamlined future dev process.

We will explore thoroughly ExtendScript Toolkit, including: which languages it supports; the DOMs of multiple Adobe apps; OMV & Documentation; the JavaScript Console, Scripts – Favorites, Breakpoints, Call Stack, Data Browser and Find Results Panels.

We will write scripts – courtesy of Adobe’s Tom Ruark, Jeff Tranberry and myself – that can: rename files; perform conditional actions; process multiple images; get/set layer/channel/frame properties; create a variety of text file flavors (.xml, .js, .as); create new folders; and save, copy & move files. For the more advanced scripts, we will focus on manipulating active items (activeDocument, activeLayers) and collections (documents, layers, channels, frames).

Before moving on to driving the Adobe apps via swfs, we will review good coding practices and discovering and includingunsupported objects/features/functions in PS.

For the SWFs portion of the workshop, we will explore the following: Flash palettes & panels; ScriptUI; the different Window Types including the pros and cons of each; which apps, OSs and AS versions are supported by each; and pitfalls to avoid.

We will work through several examples of developing SWFs that drive Adobe apps, including: a simple Hello World example of a swfPalette driving PS; a swfPalette that draws selected symbols in AI; and a swfPanel that drives Flash. We will also work through a simple example that demonstrates inter-application communication – where we can have two Adobe CS3 apps communicate to each other through the swfPalette. We will wrap up this secton with a discussion about what to expect in regards to Adobe CS4 apps support of SWFs and some new tools from Adobe that will streamline the dev process.

For the AIR section of the workshop, we will review the existing process of establishing two-way communication between the AIR and Adobe CS3 apps. We will create an example that allows us to communicate and drive Illustrator from an AIR app. To wrap up this section, I will present a new Adobe tool that will dramatically improve how AIR apps can drive Adobe apps as well as explore a wish list of new functionality I hope we will be able to play with in the distant future.

To wrap up the workshop, we will focus on the process of Purchasing, Distribution and Installation procedures – associated with the new tools we develop – that are in place today. Discussions and working through the process of installing our swfs and scripts via the Extension Manager will also be explored.

I hope to see you there.

Woohoo!
Drew

just a quick post well i’m in the trenches… flickr now has video. woohoo! the quality is good – not as great as vimeo’s hd – and there is a 90 second/150 mb limit on the upload. that’s not too bad of a constraint when you’re compressing with the h.264 codec… but the time limit is pretty small.

As time rushes by in this wonderful life, I find myself awestruck and inspired by the beauty of a painting or how an architect captures light in a way that immediately makes you feel at home. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does… you know it instantly. I found one of those moments today… in the lost art of the music video. Through the lens of Encylopedia Pictura, we enter Björk’s world via the Wanderlust video, where our emotions resonate and we are left with [insert comments below].

The making of the video can be seen here.

Originally posted by Christophe.

After a long pause, I finally had the time to continue an experiment where the brush stroke is partially driven by the music. For this experiment I was able to push it a step further thanks to Ben | Hecq | Lukas Boysen’s incredible music, and because he also provided each instrument as an individual file. This allowed me to analyze each instrument individually within After Effects and export that keyframe data using my AE2Flash: Audio Amplitude flash component to map the audio back to individual brush strokes.

The photo of me was taken by Monica Hoover, a wonderful person and extremely talented photographer who lives in San Diego, runs the voice 1156 art gallery and has worked for peeps like shepard fairey.

There’s a relatively new error when rendering out of After Effects due to Apple’s QuickTime 7.4.

“After Effects error: opening movie – you do not have permission to open this file (-54). ”

If you recently upgraded to 7.4, you’ll want to upgrade again to 7.4.1 to resolve the issue. Here’s a little more info on the bug:

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3c05dee6/7

with the smell of honeysuckles and the weekend upon me, i used to love going down to the beach in san diego, meeting up with casey and rob and hitting the laid back and locals hangout, swami’s, for some banana nut pancakes and some great coffee. there was something magical about those mornings, as the marine layer of clouds broke and the smell and the sounds of the ocean rolled in.

on one of those mornings, as i went to casey’s, a crowd of a few hundred happy people gathered near lou’s records. we doubled back to see what was happening and climbing onto the stage was jack johnson. watching and listening to him play… i couldn’t help but think that his music personifies those wonderful mornings for me. he has a new album out, Sleep Through the Static. enjoy!

This Organic Color Visualization is inspired by the colors in latest advertisement for the fashion house of Salvatore Ferragamo. More info on Salvatore can be found here. A video of the process used to create this painting, which uses a custom AIR application that I’m developing to drive Photoshop CS3, can be viewed here.